Opening up local government data?

August 4th, 2009

Openly Local

Openly Local is a recently launched “first draft of getting hold of and making accessible local government data in a consistent and useful form”.

There is generally a lot of support for open data from central government in the UK - particularly from the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Cabinet Office and with Gordon Brown’s recent announcement that he is asking Tim Berners-Lee to help open up government data in the UK. We are pleased to see that OKF Director Rufus Pollock’s call for Raw Data Now, which Sir Tim cited in a talk at TED, has played a prominent part in his advice!

However, open government data does not seem to receive such attention in local government.

Openly Local has made a start on opening up local government data:

To start off, I’ve concentrated on getting the basic information — current councillors, committees, membership of those committees, and minutes for those committee meetings. I started off with a little over a dozen councils (though that’s since increased to over 40 of them).

At the time of writing this includes information on: 61 councils, 3797 councillors, 2065 committees and 11922 committee meetings.

We’d love to hear examples of local government data that is already explicitly open - and suggestions for local government data that you’d like to be made open!

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Posted by Jonathan Gray Filed in Exemplars, External, Government, Open Data, Open Government Data

4 Responses to “Opening up local government data?”

  1. The Open Knowledge Foundation (okfn) 's status on Wednesday, 05-Aug-09 19:02:59 UTC - Identi.ca Says:
    August 5th, 2009 at 7:03 pm

    [...] http://blog.okfn.org/2009/08/04/opening-up-local-government-data/ [...]

  2. Martin Stone Says:
    August 11th, 2009 at 6:28 pm

    A number of Local Authorities have exposed their data in Local Information Systems (LIS). You can find a list of LIS at http://www.data4nr.net/local-information-systems/local/

  3. Martin Stone Says:
    August 11th, 2009 at 6:37 pm

    The information you are displaying on Openly Local is also available at http://www.places.communities.gov.uk/ but of course not in the same format and not (yet) as LinkedData

  4. Jonathan Gray Says:
    August 11th, 2009 at 7:30 pm

    Many thanks for this Martin!

    I’ve added both of these to CKAN:

    I’ve also started a page on our wiki for recommendations:

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